scheme is fated to work out, or the gods are pleased with me for engineering your demise, Jean Tannen. I love a win-win proposition. Now don’t you two have work to do?”
2
IN THE House of Glass Roses, there was a hungry garden.
The place was Camorr in microcosm; a thing of the Eldren, left behind for men to puzzle over—a dangerous treasure discarded like a toy. The Elderglass that mortared its stones rendered it proof against all human arts, much like the Five Towers and a dozen other structures scattered over the islands of the city. The men and women who lived in these places were squatters in glory, and the House of Glass Roses was the most glorious, dangerous place on the Alcegrante slopes. That Don Maranzalla held it was a sign of his high and lasting favor with the duke.
Just before the midpoint of the noon hour the next day, Jean Tannen stood at the door of Don Maranzalla’s tower: five cylindrical stories of gray stone and silver glass, a hulking fastness that made the lovely villas around it look like an architect’s scale models. Great waves of white heat beat down from the cloudless sky, and the air was heavy with the slightly beery breath of a city river boiling under long hours of sun. A frosted glass window was set into the stone beside the tower’s huge lacquered oaken doors, behind which the vague outline of a face could be discerned. Jean’s approach had been noted.
He’d gone north over the Angevine on a glass catbridge no wider than his hips, clinging to the guide ropes with sweaty hands for all six hundred feet of the crossing. There were no large bridges to the south bank of the Isla Zantara, second most easterly of the Alcegrante isles. Ferry rides were a copper half-baron. For those too poor to ride, that left the ecstatic terror of the catbridges. Jean had never been aloft on one before, and the sight of more experienced men and women ignoring the ropes as they crossed at speed had turned his bowels to ice water. The feel of hard pavement beneath his shoes had been a blessed relief when it came again.
The sweat-soaked yellowjackets on duty at the Isla Zantara gatehouse had let Jean pass far more quickly than he’d thought possible, and he’d seen the mirth drain from their ruddy faces the moment they recognized the sigil he carried. Their directions after that had been terse; was it pity that tinged their voices, or fear?
“We’ll look for you, boy,” one of them suddenly called after him as he started up the clean white stones of the street, “if you come back down the hill again!”
Mingled pity and fear, then. Had Jean really been enthusiastic for this adventure as recently as the night before?
The creak and rattle of counterweights heralded the appearance of a dark crack between the twin doors before him. A second later, the portals swung wide with slow majesty, muscled outward by a pair of men in bloodred waistcoats and sashes, and Jean saw that each door was half a foot of solid wood backed with iron bands. A wave of scents washed out over him: humid stone and old sweat, roasting meat and cinnamon incense. Smells of prosperity and security, of life within walls.
Jean held his wallet up to the men who’d opened the door, and one of them waved a hand impatiently. “You’re expected. Enter as a guest of Don Maranzalla and respect his house as you would your own.”
Against the left-hand wall of the opulent foyer, a pair of curlicue staircases in black iron wound upward; Jean followed the man around and up one set of narrow steps, self-consciously trying to keep his sweating and gasping under control. The tower doors were pulled shut beneath them with an echoing slam.
They wound their way up past three floors of glittering glass and ancient stone, decorated with thick red carpets and innumerable stained tapestries that Jean recognized as battle flags. Don Maranzalla had served as the duke’s personal swordmaster and the commander of his blackjackets for a quarter of a century. These bloody scraps of cloth were all that remained of countless companies of men fate had thrown against Nicovante and Maranzalla in fights that were now legend: the Iron Sea Wars, the Mad Count’s Rebellion, the Thousand-Day War against Tal Verrar.
At last, the winding stair brought them up into a small dim room, barely larger than a closet, lit